Getting Our Facts Straight: Will 50% of North Carolina Hispanic Girls Become Pregnant Before Age 20?
A recent newspaper story in the Raleigh News & Observer quoted a statistic from the National Campaign to Prevent Unwanted and Teen Pregnancies that stated that 50% of Hispanic Girls will become pregnant before the age of 20. The only thing missing from this report was the word "nationally." Nationally this statistic may be true, but is it true in North Carolina? We ran the numbers to find out.
As it turns out, in North Carolina, the percent who became pregnant for the first time before the age of 20 was 39.5%. But what does this number tell us about future pregnancies? As it turns out, not that much. While this statistic can describe what has already happened, it's not very useful to predict future trends. It can't take into account sexual activity, number of partners, risky behaviors or any other mitigating factor. Any projection of this number into the future is bound to be merely a guess.
However, what does it tell us that the overall average for all North Carolina girls was 30% and the Hispanic average was 39.5%? It tells us that we clearly have a lot of work to do in reaching out to the Hispanic population. We have a collective responsibility to serve all of North Carolina's youth and we need to do more to reach this specific population. There are rays of hope: the Hablando Claro program, pioneered by the Annie E. Casey Foundation is a community based program that is designed to help prevent teen pregnancy through increased community involvement and communication; APPCNC itself has long been a leader nationally in Hispanic Outreach and continues to offer trainings and resources to better serve this population; and there are exceptional models in the communities of North Carolina such as Communities in Schools of Thomasville in partnership with Thomasville Middle School. Together they have an afterschool pregnancy prevention program called S.T.E.P.P.. STEPP stands for Students Together Encouraging Pregnancy Prevention and has a separate male and female class for Hispanic students. These classes are taught by Mariel Gomez de laTorre, the middle school ESL teacher and Jorge Alonzo from the Family Life Council. The class is offered once in the Fall and once in the Spring and covers topics ranging from self-esteem, developing decision making skills, and setting goals to sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy, parenting, birth control, and abstinence. The students take a field trip to the local health department and to the local community college and are rewarded at the end of the program with a trip to the local mall and $10 spending money. Both classes make use of best practice curricula (Jovenes Sabios for the boys and Making Proud Choices for the girls).
With programs like the S.T.E.P.P. program and Hablando Claro and agencies like APPCNC, we can make a difference for all children and adolescents in North Carolina.
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